2025 Annual Meeting Welcome Letter
Hello & Welcome to All
It is my honour and privilege to welcome you to the 2025 ISMRM Annual Meeting and Exhibition, and to the amazing Convention Centre in Honolulu Hawai’i. I hope you find the open-air feel and sea breezes around the centre a wonderful and enjoyable experience.
The theme for the 2025 meeting is ‘ISMRM – towards a Healthier Footprint’. In addition to focusing on fantastic meeting content we have spent some time during the last year working out how we can continue to make our meeting good value for our attendees, to improve our use of resources, and to improve the accessibility of the meeting to people who find it challenging to come to the main meeting every year.
We need to thank the folk that make this meeting happen – mainly the Annual Meeting Program Committee and Central Office under the leadership of Anne-Marie Kahrovic – they have been amazing. The AMPC has been led by Kei Yamada (Chair), Katy Keenan (Vice Chair) and Brian Hargreaves (Past Chair). Their energy and team work has been extraordinary and we thank them all.
Our Named Lectures
We have a great line up for these, our most prestigious lectures– with broad appeal to our mixed community. On Sunday we have Prof Reza Rezavi deliver the Mansfield lecture ‘Fixing a Broken Heart: A Clear Image for the Future’. On Tuesday, Prof. Shintaro Ichikawa is presenting the NIBIB lecture on ‘Quantitative MRI Biomarkers for Chronic Liver Disease’, and on Thursday, Prof. Kim Butts Pauly will deliver the Lauterbur Lecture, ‘Bringing Transcranial-Focused Ultrasound into Focus’.
The Plenaries
In my week’s program, the plenaries are really important – and often the sessions I remember most afterwards. This year we have the special Ernst Plenary (see below). On Monday we have ‘From Bits to Qubits: Advancing Medical Diagnosis with Quantum-Powered AI, on Tuesday we have ‘Crosstalk in Liver-Cardio-Brain Function. On Thursday, we will be hearing about ‘Open-Source Revolution: Reproducible Sequences, Hardware and Reconstruction Algorithms. Lots to learn and think about.
Something Different
This year, we have the Ernst Plenary rather than the named lecture. This will occur Wednesday morning and is focused on ‘Environmentally Sustainable MRI Equipment’. I must thank Kate Hanneman for organizing this and I hope that this will alert our attendees to some of the real threats to our practice.
Other sustainability initiatives are scattered here and there in our meeting, you may notice them as you spend your week here (can you spot them?)
Some Fancy New Stuff
Kei Yamada has been thinking hard about how to make it easier for researchers to present when English is not their first language. He is piloting the use of ‘the third moderator’ – somebody fluent in English and in the presenter’s native language. This is primarily to help support the Q&A session following a presentation, often the most challenging aspect of presenting in a foreign language. We are also piloting pre-recorded talks – your feedback on this will be helpful/essential to planning future meetings.
Katy Keenan has overseen the construction of a great Education Program. Special initiatives include ‘Coil Building for Clinicians: Hands-On Session for Non-Physicists’. which will be offered on Monday evening. I am sure that this will be super popular – so join the session early. There is also another session on Sunday morning, called ‘What does a Radiologist Actually Do?’ designed to help scientists understand clinical environments.
Accessibility
There are many reasons why people may want to, but cannot, take part in our meeting. These include financial, caring, disability, sustainability, conflicting responsibilities concerns. Virtual attendance has partially addressed this, but – when I tried this during the COVID pandemic- I found it lacking many of the fun and essential elements of the main meeting. To supplement this virtual program, this year we are experimenting with a MiniHub in Lille, France. Running a site distant from the main meeting, may improve accessibility for those who cannot travel, yet bring some of the networking, discussion and social aspects of the main meeting. So welcome to our attendees in Lille and we hope you have a different but valuable meeting.
Our Gold Corporate Sponsors
We are always grateful to our corporate sponsors. Their financial contribution to the meeting is one of the main reasons we can support such a healthy student attendance through the stipend program. Please do attend the Gold Corporate Symposia in the Plenary Hall which start on Sunday, 11 May 2025. See the schedule below.
Sunday, 11 May at 12:00 – Canon Medical
Monday, 12 May at 12:30 – Philips Healthcare
Tuesday, 13 May at 12:15 – Siemens Healthineers
Wednesday, 14 May at 12:15 – United Imaging Healthcare
Thursday, 15 May at 12:00 – GE HealthCare
Finally
Do come to the opening reception, say hello to your friends, make new friends and find and inspire a student. Do come and see what our vendors and colleagues in industry have to offer our community.
Come to the Awards Ceremony on Monday morning and honour our new Gold medalists and Senior Fellows. These are people who have made substantial contributions to our everyday working MRI lives.
And thank you for coming to our meeting. I really hope that you learn something new, find a new research partner, find something that will change your clinical practice, have a new idea or light bulb moment. This is why we come together to share this incredible experience. Enjoy Honolulu.
Margaret A. Hall-Craggs, M.D.
2024-2025 ISMRM President
